Colombia: “The dead-end peace agreement is now in limbo” (AWTWNS 10 October 2016)

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Colombia: “The dead-end peace agreement is now in limbo”

10 October 2016. A World to Win News Service. The following is by the Revolutionary Communist Group (GCR) of Colombia (posted on acgcr.com 4 October 2016).

Everything seemed to be going full steam ahead last 26 September when, after four years of public negotiations, the peace agreement between the Colombian state and the Farc (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) was signed in Cartagena, Colombia. Many of the country’s big shots and 15 presidents, 37 chancellors and 10 heads of international organizations, including the UN and the Organization of American States, attended the ceremony marking the end of a war that has lasted more than fifty years. In a fast-lane “special legislative procedure for peace”, parliament was to pass amnesty legislation a few weeks later. Farc guerrillas were to gather in camps located in some twenty zones, under the supervision of the Colombian army and the UN, and the guerrillas were to turn over their arms to the UN in the last three months of the six-month cantonment process. At that time, about April 2017, the Farc was to launch a legal political party to consummate their entry into the establishment. But one gear was missing from this machinery: it was hoped that the agreement that had been reached in Havana and signed in Cartagena would be endorsed by a referendum held on Sunday, 2 October. This step was considered a piece of cake, since polls had predicted an overwhelming victory for the “Yes” vote. Both sides had agreed to the date for that vote, chosen because it is the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, who was actually a misogynist defender of the caste system in India. That icon of “non-violence” was complicit with the brutal apartheid system in South Africa, where he lived for several decades, before returning to India to lead the people in a reconciliation between British imperialism and the country’s reactionary regime aimed at preventing the crisis situation from moving toward a revolutionary resolution.

But the polls proved disastrously wrong. With the unexpected triumph of the “No” vote in the referendum, the agreement has been put on hold. This outcome was considered so implausible that the Washington Post summed it up with a meme saying, “If the Colombians had been dinosaurs, they would have voted for the meteorite” [whose impact with the Earth triggered their extinction]. Yet the “No” vote won by a narrow margin, less than half a percentage point (49.78 percent for “Yes”, versus 50.21 percent for “No”), with a very high level of abstention (62 percent). Both the Farc and the government of President Juan Manuel Santos had bet everything on the victory of the “Yes” vote in the referendum. All along Santos insisted that he had no “plan B”, and the Farc, even after the results of the plebiscite were known, insisted that there was no turning back from their abandonment of the armed struggle. Not even the most extreme right, the main promoters of the “No” vote, had taken into account the possibility that they would win. Now they are scrambling to go from being part of the background scenery to playing a leading role in the negotiations drama.

The split in the ruling classes between supporters and opponents of the peace agreement is tragicomic. On the one hand, they have used clumsy lies to trick, manipulate and degrade a great many people, as they often do, to drag them into one or the other camp. On the other, while the differences among the right are in many ways only a question of nuance, there is a real division of opinion about how to deal with the guerrillas and particularly about the peace agreement, reflecting the interests of different, although closely related, economic and social sectors. The agreement would affect very sensitive issues for the sector led by ex-President Alvaro Uribe, especially the big landowners, a sector that tends toward fascism (Uribe’s conception of the state is based on the work of Carl Schmitt [a Nazi legal theorist, later pro-American, known for his advocacy of the removal of legal constraints on the exercise of state power]) as part of what has already been a long period of rightward drift (with the increasing influence of religious obscurantism) for the whole traditional political spectrum, including the armed reformists.

Lenin was very insightful right when he wrote, “People always were and always will be the foolish victims of deceit and self-deceit in politics until they learn to discover the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. The supporters of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realize that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is maintained by the forces of some ruling classes.” The different visions on both sides of the peace agreement and the disputes about the plebiscite itself are full of “moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises” – and behind them we must “discover the interests of some class” or class sector.

*****

The agreement comprises five points: (1) policies for comprehensive development in agriculture; (2) political participation; (3) end to the conflict; (4) solution to the problem of illegal drugs; (5) the victims. There is an additional point about the implementation, approval and supervision of the agreement. Of the five points, the one that bothers the far right the least is the end of the conflict. The two most bothersome are the points about land (1) and justice for the victims (5). The point about land, which calls for clearing up land titles and property rights in the countryside, would expose the land usurpers who have resorted to barbarism, causing about a million deaths in wave after wave of violence with their “chulavitas”, “pájaros” and other kinds of paramilitary forces during the last century and through today. Many big landowners, especially cattle ranchers and industrial agricultural producers (with large plantations) would find it difficult to explain how they acquired “their” lands. The point about justice would mean punishment for thousands of military men including generals (and their civilian superiors) who committed or ordered genocide, like the case of the more than 5,000 civilians known to have been murdered [and their bodies used by the authorities] to substantiate claims of casualties inflicted on the guerrillas, the so-called “false positives”. The instigators and financial backers of the paramilitary groups would be called to account. Among them, Uribe himself, along with his family and friends, would have a lot of explaining to do. Yet with the points about political participation (2) and democratizing rural property (1), the “final” agreement signed in Cartagena concentrates the common aspirations of both sides, both of them waving the flag of bourgeois democracy as the pinnacle of history.

But the agreement turns out to be less than meaningful for the people insofar as it does not seek to transform anything radically (radical in the sense of getting to the roots of things). What it does mean is an opportunity for the imperialists and local ruling classes to shore up their system (the system of the production and exchange of commodities that characterizes capitalism) and legitimize it in the eyes of the people, and an opportunity for the Farc reformists to become more directly a part of the establishment. And despite the political tug of war over the past few months, the talks between the government and the ELN [National Liberation Army, another, smaller guerrilla group, formed in 1964 under the influence of Cuba] seek to achieve the same ends, even if right now they maintain that they are not going to come to an agreement without significant changes in Colombian society.

One of the objectives of this peace process with the traditional guerrillas is to ensure, with their support, that there will be no further armed mass uprisings against the oppressors and everything reactionary, and to further steer the general discontent among the masses into channels through which the local ruling classes and the imperialists can ensure the defence and legitimization of their social order. This is an order in which imperialist domination disarticulates and distorts the national economy, developing productive enclaves as required by imperialist needs, using natural resources as raw materials to be inserted into global circuits of production and accumulation, including the production of cocaine, which involves all the ruling classes and the financial system that, in the end, crowns the whole drug business. This order conditions development in some regions and also makes deals with semi-feudalism, which is still rampant, especially in the whole political and social superstructure, widening the gap between the growing and deepening poverty of the masses and the parasitism of a handful of imperialist servants who also control the media to maintain an iron dictatorship.

Unmasking and rejecting the “peace agreements” as a fatal illusion for the people does not mean taking the same side as the reactionary sector (ex-presidents Uribe and Andres Pastrana and the rest) that has (so far) opposed those agreements, people who, in the words of the ex-president Belisario Betancur, “are, in their way, helping to bring out the shortcomings of the process” – in other words, turning the whole situation further to the right in political terms and benefiting the ruling classes as a whole and imperialism. Nor does this position mean opting for the reactionary war. It is simplistic to argue that we have no choice but to take one or the other side in the country’s present political polarization, that we have to back either the much-trumpeted “peace” or a brutal war against the people in which neither the Farc nor the ELN represent anything positive in terms of people’s aspirations for something radically different. In fact, both are playing into the hands of the system with their armed struggle that was never intended to be more than a bargaining chip to win a few reforms while leaving the overall framework of exploitation and oppression intact. This is a simple expression of destructive “determinist realism”, a passive and reactionary understanding of objective reality and “necessity” that declares that “what is desirable is what is possible and what is possible is what exists”.

The predominant positions in the political polarization around the “peace agreements” between armed reformists, on one side, and the imperialists and Colombian ruling classes on the other, represent nothing but a dead end for the masses – poor peasants, youth, women, etc. The terms of the debate that many people have been pushed to accept and which fill the media represent a smokescreen behind which imperialism is more deeply penetrating the country and inserting it into the global dynamics of the capitalist-imperialist system. At the same time, there are increasing efforts to control and repress the people. For example, the fascist new code of conduct for the police has been tacitly accepted. The situation is being used to propagate reactionary verdicts on the people’s struggles and on the possibility and necessity of a real revolution.

This is part of the framework for this agreement, which cannot be seen as simply a “Colombian thing” or a regional affair. The imperialists see it as part of an historical question. They are ecstatic that the world’s oldest so-called “Marxist” guerrillas are giving up “the revolution” and agreeing to become part of a democratic state.

But first of all, the Farc has never represented either revolution or communism, no matter how often these words might be used, and what they are giving up on is not revolution. These false claims are enabled by today’s ubiquitous lies and distortions about revolution and communism. Even when it was under the influence of the now defunct Communist Party of Colombia, the Farc arose as a form of peasant self-defence against government repression, organized to fight for a few changes in the land distribution dominated by big landlords, and to oppose the rigged political system under the two-party National Front, a political deal to pass the government back and forth every four years between sectors of the ruling classes concentrated in the Conservative and Liberal parties. This arrangement, which lasted from 1958 to 1974, was supposed to be a way to share power and settle the disputes that had taken a violent term at the end of the 1940s. The Farc programme basically represented the interests of settler peasants who had opened up new regions for cultivation in the face of pressure from the big landlords (and, in recent decades, the acquisition of extensive landholdings by imperialists and local entrepreneurs involved in agro-industrial production and global food and fuel crop speculation), and the middle peasantry that demanded that the state bring about reforms in terms of land access, but without radical opposition to imperialist domination and the property relations and reactionary ideas associated with this domination and feudal backwardness. The Farc – and the ELN – have coexisted with and defended the property of big landlords and agro-industrial firms owned by multinationals and local big landowners, as long as these owners pay the “revolutionary taxes” demanded of them, and have benefited, directly or “indirectly”, from drug trafficking. Their goal has always been to join the establishment by means of an agreement that would allow them to end their armed struggle with the achievement of a few barely liberal reforms that are fully in line with the capitalist development imperialism requires.

“Comprehensive agrarian development – one of the agreement’s “major accomplishments” – is to be accomplished by “an alliance between businessmen and peasants” through the establishment of new Peasant Reserve Zones. Under this scheme, a few hectares of barren land would be handed over to organized peasant communities so as to restrict the monopolization of land ownership. Similar mechanisms were set up by the state in the 1990s and denounced by Farc at that time. The objective of the promised infrastructural improvements, access to credit and technical assistance is a more rational – capitalist – organization of exploitation in the countryside and of peasant labour. The idea is to deal with the legal obstacles to such changes after decades of a brutal war against the masses of people in the countryside. A much greater concentration of land ownership was brought about by driving people off the land and massacring them. Today, according to a recent census, 0.4 percent of property owners hold 42 percent of the land dedicated to crops and livestock, while 60 percent of families in the countryside have no land at all. There is a greater concentration of land ownership today than before the agrarian reform laws of the 1960s. The peace agreement implicitly accepts the Santos government’s agrarian programme. Santos’s proposed Rural Economic and Social Development Zones are perfectly compatible with the Peasant Reserve Zones that the agreement calls for.

Secondly, what is being agreed to is not the end of a revolutionary armed struggle. Although the Farc and ELN have taken up arms, a radical form of struggle, their goals have nothing to do with getting to the roots of problems. They are not radical goals. What is needed is a revolutionary communist leadership that embodies a scientific method and approach and a truly liberating morality consistent with the highest aspirations of all humanity to guide the masses, and for the masses to make this vision their own, striving for the elimination of “the four alls”: the abolition of all class distinctions, all the relations of production on which they rest, all the social relations that correspond to these production relations, and the revolutionization of all the ideas that correspond to those social relations. There is absolutely nothing like this in the outlook of the Farc and ELN.

The decisive question for the people is whether this capitalist-imperialist system, and the concrete expression of its domination in countries like Colombia, will continue devastating lives and the planet itself, legitimizing its actions through all of its political representatives – including those who present themselves as leftists – or whether, on the contrary, there will be a new repolarization with the development of a movement for revolution led by a real revolutionary communist party, one that makes Bob Avakian’s new synthesis of communism its own, so that amidst the struggles against the outrages committed by this system it can lead the people to transform themselves to struggle radically and carry out a real revolution that can allow humanity to shake off all the dark years of oppressive and exploitative societies. This is the revolutionary communists’ crucial challenge.

As the traditional parties are falling into chaos and the functioning of this bourgeois democracy is making millions of people more frustrated and angry every day, there are tremendous possibilities to show the necessity for a radical solution to all this: the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order and the establishment of a new, really revolutionary state that can mobilize the people to begin to solve the problems humanity faces and overcome the divisions and inequalities that now devastate it. The growing polarization of society presents serious dangers. But these same explosive conditions also bring real opportunities to begin to forge a different kind of future. There is an urgent need for millions of people to unite to confront the enormous problems of the people in Colombia and the whole world from a perspective based on the needs of oppressed humanity. We have to lift our sights beyond the horizon of the present system and begin to build a movement that not only fights the reactionary onslaught but can also take us to the only real solution, communist revolution.

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Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.